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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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06693_Field_TCUM T258.txt
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1996-04-10
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861b
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16 lines
Romans got the Phoenician letters from the Greeks but
retained a number system that was much more ancient. Wayne
and Shuster, the comedian team, never fail to get a good laugh
when they line up a group of ancient Roman cops in togas and
have them number themselves from left to right, uttering
Roman numerals.
This joke demonstrates how the pressure of numbers
caused men to seek ever more streamlined methods of
numeration. Before the advent of ordinal, successive, or
positional numbers, rulers had to count large bodies of soldiery
by displacement methods. Sometimes they were herded by
groups into spaces of approximately known area. The method
of having them march in file and of dropping pebbles into
containers was another method not unrelated to the abacus
and the counting board. Eventually the method of the counting